Sessions at SXSW Interactive 2012 about Scaling

Saturday 10th March 2012

Over 25 years ago, Super Mario was the only one who could say he was gaming in the cloud, stomping Goombas, eating mushrooms and occasionally using extraordinary leaping skills to jump from cloud to cloud in search of Princess Peach Toadstool. Fast forward to over a decade later and come hear from Rackspace, Zynga, EA Games and RightScale how they are also gaming in the cloud. Cloud Gaming is the next generation in online gaming. The main upside to using the cloud is that huge upfront costs are gone. Users don’t have to get expensive and bulky consoles - all they need is a reliable and fast Internet connection and service providers can provide an almost seamless and quick online gaming experience. The panelists will talk about how gaming leaders are using the cloud to keep track of in-game player achievements and building out the software. They can also discuss how they are relying on the cloud to provide the scalability needed as the games gain more users and functionality.

Tuesday 13th March 2012

On Thursday, June 2, 2011, LulzSecurity.com registered for CloudFlare — a service designed to make any website faster and more secure. One hour after they registered, they published 3.5 million usernames and passwords allegedly stolen from Sony Pictures' website.

For the next three weeks, LulzSec claimed to hack organizations ranging from the CIA, to the US Senate, to the Arizona Immigration Police. In the meantime, law enforcement, cyber vigilantes, and rival hackers worked to unmask LulzSec and launch major attacks of their own to knock LulzSecurity.com offline. CloudFlare watched it all from the heart of the crossfire.

We've received permission from LulzSec to tell exactly what it's like to be one of the most notorious hacking groups of all time and how to keep your site online when the whole world is trying to shut you down. This is the inside story.

It's every engineers dream to work on a company that becomes one of the top 10 largest sites online. This group of panelists have done just that. From Twitter to Facebook to Yahoo! - these engineers, tech operations, and cloud computing specialists have seen it all and will discuss what it's like to scale the largest infrastructures imaginable. This session will discuss what it takes for a team of engineers to scale to an Internet Giant, how it's done, and what the best practices are for making it happen.